


The good soldier and the better man

by teeglow



Series: Constance and Aramis, heart to heart [3]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Episode: s01e04 The Good Soldier, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 13:46:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12706221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teeglow/pseuds/teeglow
Summary: Tag to s1 e4 The Good Soldier. Aramis comes to apologise to Constance for dragging her into his affairs, but there's a deeper sadness there that Constance can't ignore.





	The good soldier and the better man

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: there's not a lot of detail but just in case, there are mentions of the scene where Marsac harassed Constance in the episode itself.

Constance is elated when she returns to her home that evening. She can still smell the gunpowder, whether that’s all in her head or not, and feel that goosepimply sensation from when the gun finally felt _right_ in her hand, when D’Artagnan took her elbow and she could feel-

Well, it didn’t matter what she could feel. She walks back to her house with a slight spring in her step, a light flush in her cheeks, as she leaps over puddles and approaches her door, but something makes her stop short as she arrives. 

Aramis is standing there, leaning against her wall, head bowed and hair dripping onto her doorstep. She is taken aback to see him and she looks on for a second unsure what to do. He senses her presence though and looks up. They exchange small smiles, and she notices that it’s not the usual smile Aramis reserves for her. It’s apprehensive, cautious even, but she thinks he’s trying to hide it.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ she says breezily, as if she hasn’t noticed that he looks like the sky is about to fall. She moves to unlock her front door and steps inside. He stands there, looking forlorn and she gives him a look as if to say ‘what are you waiting for?’, beckoning him inside. He follows her into the dry, running a hand through his sopping hair bashfully. 

‘I’m sorry to barge in on you, I won’t stay long. It’s just-’ He tails off and Constance doesn’t think she’s ever seen him lost for words in the time she’s known him, but then again, she hasn’t really known him for long. ‘I just wanted to apologise.’

‘Oh,’ she says, surprised really but not entirely sure why. Aramis has always been courteous, almost as much as he has been infuriating. ‘It’s fine, Aramis, really.’

‘It’s not,’ he replies in his typically matter-of-fact way, leaving no room for argument. ‘You shouldn’t have been put in this position and I didn’t mean for anything to come between you and D’Artagnan.’

Constance prays that her face isn’t as flushed as it feels and waves him off. ‘Honestly, it’s okay. He was your friend. And you weren’t to know what he was going to do.’

He shakes his head. ‘It’s no-’ He stops and snaps his head up to meet her gaze. He had a feeling she wasn’t referring to the attempt on Treville’s life. ‘Hang on. What did he do?’

She suddenly realises that D’Artagnan probably never got round to telling the boys what had happened, or at least certainly not Aramis, who’d had his own problems to deal with. She mentally kicks herself and Aramis takes a small step closer in concern before catching himself. She can tell he’s worried about scaring her.

‘Constance, what is it? What did he do? Did he hurt you?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, no, he just tried it on, that’s all.’ She turns away, downplaying the way her heart stopped when Marsac pushed her against the table, downplaying the bruises she can feel on her wrists, a tangible reminder that Marsac had been there, because she doesn’t think Aramis needs to hear it all right now. ‘D’Artagnan came back before he went too far.’

Aramis raises his eyebrows and turns away, wiping his damp forehead with his wrist. He breathes something under his breath, and Constance is sure is that he would have sworn had she not been there, but then he seems to push the anger back in and turns back to her, face creased in sincerity instead. 

‘I had no idea. Constance, I’m so sorry.’ He sounds so ashamed and Constance hates it because she doesn’t think she’s being kind or generous, it really isn’t his fault Marsac did what he did. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine. No harm done.’ She smiles, but pulls her cardigan closer around her subconsciously. Aramis looks like he wants to melt into the ground. ‘Aramis,’ she says, looking for him to look at her. ‘It’s okay. Really.’

He nods and swipes his hair out of his eyes again. He looks really quite young now, and, dare she say, a little lost. She notices the bruise darkening his eye.

‘What happened to your eye?’ she asks and he raises his fingers to it absentmindedly, as if he’d forgotten that it hurt. 

‘Oh it’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Just bruised.’

‘I can see that,’ she replies, motioning him to sit. For a fraction of a second, he seems to hesitate but then he thinks better of it and eases himself into a chair. She wonders if it hurts him that Marsac sat there only hours ago. He seems to find it hard to look at certain corners of the room.

She busies herself, lighting the hob and heating a pan, giving, she hopes, Aramis time to respond as he wants. The last thing she wants to do is push him. He seems frayed at the edges, spread too thin. Marsac’s reappearance has pulled on a loose thread, one that hangs behind the cheek and the terrible jokes. Constance wants to tell him it’ll be okay, but her instinct tells her that’s not what he’s after. 

‘Did-’ he starts, but his voice sounds tight and he has to clear his throat before he can continue. ‘Did D’Artagnan tell you what happened? In the end?’

She turns to him tentatively. ‘Not everything. I know Marsac’s…’ She stops to choose her words carefully. ‘gone.’

His throat seems to have gone dry and he swallows hard as he nods. ‘I killed him,’ he says, and his voice falters and Constance wonders if he’s going to cry. Goodness knows, she wouldn’t blame him.

‘Aramis-’

He shakes his head tightly. ‘He tried to kill the Captain,’ he says and Constance doesn’t miss the use of Treville’s title, even now, after everything. She thinks Aramis needs the structure, that he can’t think of Treville as a friend right now. He has to think of him as his superior, the man whose orders he followed, the man who had saved his life countless times and the man he had pledged to return the favour to. Marsac was his friend and a deserter. Marsac tried to kill the captain. Aramis had no choice. 

‘I’m sorry, Aramis,’ she says, and she can’t keep the pity out of her voice. Marsac had been decent once and, more importantly, Aramis’ friend. The marksman’s loyalty, even in the face of what had happened these past few days, spoke volumes to that

‘Don’t be,’ he says, trying to force an easiness into his voice that just won’t stick. ‘Marsac died years ago. It’s just taken his body this long to catch up.’

She gets the feeling that this isn’t the first time he’s said those words. 

‘He was a good man. You know...before,’ he says and she nods, because, after everything, she knows this. ‘He was one of the best. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.’

‘None of you did,’ Constance says quietly.

Aramis doesn’t react to that, just continues. ‘Do you know how Porthos and I met?’ he asks, looking up. She shakes her head. ‘He joined about two weeks after Savoy. I wasn’t- I wasn’t myself.’ He looks up at her again, as if frightened of judgment but it’s Constance and she looks nothing but understanding. ‘Porthos helped me in a way I didn’t think anybody could after...that.’ His words are spoken with resolution, but he can’t quite keep the ghosts away from them. ‘All this time...Marsac was alone.’

Constance wants to reach out, take Aramis and just hold him because she doesn’t know how he’s doing this. Every word he speaks is tinged with sadness so heavy, she really doesn’t know how he’s sitting up under the weight of it. But she thinks he needs company, not to be coddled, and if she’s the one he’s chosen to talk to, then by God, she will do her bit and listen.

‘I couldn’t let him kill the Captain,’ he says, though she’s not sure to whom. It seems like he’s trying to reason with himself as much as her. ‘The Captain behaved with honour.’ Aramis doesn’t sound like he’s lying, or even trying to, but Constance doesn’t know if she quite believes him even so.

It was hard for all of them to believe what Marsac said of Captain Treville but it was no easier for Aramis. Treville picked him up off that forest floor five years ago almost to the day, but to know that he was also the one who put him there made Constance feel ill - she couldn’t imagine how Aramis must feel. He’d been in the regiment since it began. Treville was like a father to him.

None of them knew him back then - clearly not even Porthos who has known him the longest. Constance has barely known him a month and yet here he is, sitting at her kitchen table, hair dripping into eyes before he pushes it back hopelessly from his forehead again. Not for the first time, she wonders why he has chosen her to confide in, but she thinks perhaps choice didn’t come into it. He speaks almost like he couldn’t keep it in any longer. She wonders why he felt that he needed to keep it in at all.

And she wonders yet more why his friends are not here now and somehow finds the answer in the crease of Aramis’ brow, the tension between his shoulders, the smallest croak of confliction in his voice at the mention of the Captain. Porthos was the one who brought Aramis back from the brink and yet Porthos chose Treville. 

Porthos and Athos, the men Aramis looks to in those rare, fleeting moments that he’s lost, the men he looks to for a smile, for approval when he’s done something he shouldn’t, and whose his opinion he cares about most - they hated Marsac. 

And whilst Constance can’t blame them, she’s very aware that this whole affair was not as simple for Aramis as it was for the rest of them. To them, Marsac was a deserter, a scoundrel who cast dishonour on everything they held dear - they despised him because he made it easy for them. But Aramis still saw Marsac as what he was before Savoy - a good soldier and an even better man. He believed he could still be better.

She pours something from the hob into a cup and slides it across the table towards him, thankful when he takes it, curling his twitching fingers around the pot for warmth.

‘Where are the others?’ she asks in the end, deciding that it’s not for her to beat around the bush.

His head snaps up, taken aback a little by the question, before his shoulders slump again, almost imperceptibly, and he shrugs. ‘I haven’t seen them since the Duke left. The Captain and I left to bury Marsac.’

There’s a slight chill in his voice that Constance can’t ignore. ‘They didn’t go with you?’ she asks gently. She wonders if they even offered.

‘I didn’t want them to,’ he replies matter-of-factly which just makes the statement all the more sad. ‘They hated Marsac. They didn’t owe him anything.’

There’s a moment, just a moment, before he adds ‘And Marsac deserved to be remembered well at his own funeral. As the man he was.’ He glances at her wrist. ‘Not the one he became.’

He lifts the cup to his lips and takes a long swig, closing his eyes when he realises that it’s wine that Constance has so generously heated up. She sits herself opposite him and reaches out to touch his hand. His eyes open and she watches as his expression moves from surprised to grateful, his smile small and faltering only a little. He pats her hand and removes his, getting to his feet.

‘I’ve wasted enough of your time tonight, Madame,’ he says, walls there again as if the moment between them had given him the energy to build them back up. ‘Forgive me. I should go.’

She stands and she wants to tell him he’s a fool, he could never waste her time but she thinks he sees it in her face, his walls crumbling just a little. There’s a thank you in his eyes and she gives him a small smile of her own. 

She watches him sadly as he pushes the hair out of his eyes once again. She feels compelled to speak; she can't let him leave like this, feeling like this, not when she has his ear and words he should have heard long before now. She reaches out to stop his arm. ‘I know you think you have to deal with this on your own,’ she says gently, understanding somehow that Marsac’s death has only made him feel the loneliness in his heart more keenly. ‘But you don’t. It was easier for the others to be on Treville’s side. It didn’t mean they weren’t on yours too.’

Aramis hesitates for a moment, as if he might speak, but the words get lost, and he simply nods because he knows this in his heart. He knows what she says is true but it’s no less helpful to hear it. Of course they would believe Treville’s word over Marsac’s, a man who they knew nothing of but for the fact he left his best friend wounded and alone in the forest.

Aramis doesn’t believe they intended to leave him stranded, torn between them, but it’s hard to not let that feeling take over. Marsac saved his life at Savoy. They couldn’t understand that bond between them, not really. And he feels terribly alone now he’s gone. 

But Constance understands the ache he feels so deeply in his soul, and, not for the first or last time of their acquaintance, he finds himself grateful for Constance’s uncanny knack of getting straight to the heart of a person.

‘Thank you,’ he says quietly, his voice still a little tight. ‘You’re a good woman, Constance.’

They are quiet then, Constance not knowing what she can say to that, again sensing that a response is not what he’s after, but she gives him a small smile, feeling immensely proud and honoured anyhow. 

He’s nowhere near back to the Aramis she’s known for the last month but she sees a flash of it in the way he looks at her now, with a kind of softness tempering the sadness in his eyes just slightly. 

It had occurred to her that perhaps this melancholia was the real Aramis, and that the Aramis she has known is entirely constructed but as soon as the thought ran through her mind, she realised that it wasn’t true at all. There’s a quality to Aramis that no one could fake, the infectious warmth and easy (she would later hazard to say ‘shit-eating’) grin, but she’s reminded that still waters run deep. He’s a soldier, after all. 

He moves to the door and he wishes her goodnight quietly, hands raising to tip a hat that he only belatedly realises isn’t there. It’s because she knows him that she notices the deep regret lacing his movements and pulling his shoulders down as he leaves. She watches him go out of the window and is pleased when she sees Porthos and Athos emerge from the shadows near the well. Constance is prouder still to see D’Artagnan with them, watching as Porthos’ hand goes to the nape of Aramis’s neck and he pulls him in, his friend’s forehead willingly connecting with his chest. Perhaps not all is lost then, Constance thinks. 

It would take a lifetime to understand Aramis. A soldier who works by a strict moral code, yet seems to have an endless capacity for forgiveness. He’s a man who loves deeply, but that makes him no less deadly an assassin. 

But there’s one truth that sits at the centre of him and Constance feels like she’s always known it. He’s a good man. She knows he offered D’Artagnan somewhere to stay when he first arrived, despite barely knowing him from Adam. It was Aramis who brought D’Artagnan home after the attempted robbery of the palace, patched him up and assured Constance he would be just fine. It was Aramis who played cards with Porthos for two straight weeks so he wouldn’t get into a senseless brawl after the incident with Bonnaire, but he still fought by his side when the fight inevitably came. And she’s watched the both of them pull Athos home more times than she can count.

He’s a good man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him in Savoy and he doesn’t deserve it now. She thinks they might have failed him this week. As long as she’s got anything to do with it, they will not fail him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please feel free to leave me your comments - I love reading them!


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